I love antiques. I really love them a lot. I love the smell of an antique shop and letting my mind wander to where some of the objects may have come from.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were driving along and passed a shop I wanted to check out to see if there was anything interesting inside (I have been there before and always find something cool).

Problem was, we couldn’t tell if it was open. (If you’re reading this in a reader, you might want to check out the actual blog to see the picture and get the full meaning here!)

Now…I don’t claim to be some marketing genius (okay sometimes I do) but this is clearly not a good move.

We stopped to take a picture and once we got closer we could see a dimmed out “Open” sign so we assumed they weren’t operating that day.

I’m not going to pick on this place too much. Obviously someone forgot to take down the open sign – or the closed sign – but we all do the same thing in our businesses in one way or another. It’s just not as obvious.

When you operate a business in this day and age, your website has a major role to play. Like it or not, people are looking for you online and unless you want your competitors to do better in your market than you, you have to cater to web surfers.

Website visitors have no attention span and they have a million options thanks to Google.com to find a better site than yours to get what they need. If you’re lucky enough to get them to your site in the first place, that’s great but you have to keep them there.

That means you have to:

• Have content optimized so web surfers can find you.
• Have content written in a “web-friendly” manner (with headings and  easily scannable copy)
• Keep your online information current, compelling and engaging.
• Narrow in on their pain points as much as possible.
• Make no assumptions.
• Tell them what to do.

See, you never know which page of your website a visitor is going to land on, so you have to give a piece of your story on every page, and make it clear what you want them to do. Should they contact you for more information? Should they visit your blog? Peruse your services?

You have to make it easy for people to do business with you because a web visitor’s attention span is not long enough for them to bother with you if they don’t have to. Lay out your information concisely and clearly because unlike a retail store where you can be assisting customers, your website content and navigation has to do it all.

Imagine how you would have felt if you were me, standing in front of a shop you wanted to visit but there was an open and closed sign in the window at the same time.

Now imagine someone visiting your website for the first time. They look at the “Welcome to our website” headline, the standard “hope you enjoy our website” content and are bored to death. You don’t stand out, they don’t know if you can solve their problem and the information you do provide doesn’t have any logical sequence to it.

Be engaging, be compelling and be clear and concise with your message. If you can’t do those things, hire a copywriter to do it for you

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